| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940. By Brenda J. Child. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xviii, 143 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8032-1480-4.)

"Letters are at the heart of this story," writes Brenda J. Child in a somewhat surprising opening to her slim but important study of American Indian boarding school education. Surprising, because scholars—particularly Indians—have recently argued for the validity of oral sources against the supposed superiority of documents. Child, a Red Lake Ojibwe and professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, intends no denigration of orality, however, and, indeed, the inspiration for her book grew from conversations with relatives who attended government schools. Yet such conversations, along with published autobiography and other forms of reminiscences, draw on long-term memory. Historians such as Clyde Ellis (1996), David Wallace Adams (1995), K. Tsianina Lomawaima (1994), and the present reviewer (1993) rely mostly on reminiscences to construct Indian perspectives on assimilationist education. The letters that Child located in United States government archives were written during school years and reveal Indian pupils, parents, and white educators in the heat, joy, or misery of the moment. . . .

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